Required to do research as a medical student at Case Western Reserve University, Theodor Kolobow chose to work with Dr. George H.A. Clowes, a surgeon looking for ways to keep blood oxygenated during heart surgery. Kolobow, who loved to build things, developed a test to see which plastic membranes were the best at exchanging oxygen in the blood. He then coiled the membrane around a spindle, increasing the surface area of the membrane while decreasing the size of the device. He used suction to pull the blood through. Clowes included Kolobow’s name on the paper introducing the device to the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs in 1955. Now Kolobow’s invention, called a membrane oxygenator, is used in most ventilators.
After getting his M.D. in 1958, and completing his training at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital in 1962, Kolobow joined the U.S. Public Health Service, where he bumped into Dr. Robert Bowman. Bowman was an inventor himself, and offered Kolobow a position in the Laboratory of Technical Development at the National Heart Institute (now the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute @NIH_NHLBI). There Kolobow would continue a life-long quest to perfect the gentle treatment of injured lungs --- and branch out to include hearts too.
The first photo explains how the membrane oxygenator works. The second photo is a huge machine that Kolobow constructed in the basement of Building 31 to make ultra-thin membranes without holes. Dr. Kolobow is in the foreground. They had to do the work at night, because the smell bothered everyone else in the building.
